The SpaceX IPO and the Token Path Economy

SpaceX's IPO executed with unusual precision—a clean 20% pop rather than the dramatic 70% spike-and-crash pattern that marks most high-profile debuts. But for Gavin Baker, the story that matters isn't the first-day trading. It's what comes next: the tension between SpaceX's long-term Mars ambitions and the much nearer-term reality of how quickly they can bring gigawatts of compute online.

Near-Term Drivers vs. Long-Term Vision

Baker pushes back on the idea that SpaceX's story is a decade out. The near-term catalysts are concrete. "How quickly can they bring on terrestrial compute?" matters immediately. SpaceX monetizes gigawatts at roughly two to three times the rate of average neocloud pricing, according to Altimeter's analysis. On their Google deal, they're doing $50 billion per gigawatt. "If you can energize two, three, four gigawatts in the next year, that's a lot of revenue."

The other big variable is Cursor. After Composer 2.5 used just three weeks of reinforcement learning and supervised fine-tuning on Colossus 2 to achieve near-benchmark dominance, Baker wonders what happens when that same approach gets applied to a bigger, better base model. Cursor is already in half the Fortune 500.